MatX is a modern C++ library for numerical computing on NVIDIA GPUs and CPUs. Near-native performance can be achieved while using a simple syntax common in higher-level languages such as Python or MATLAB.
The above image shows the Python (Numpy) version of an FFT resampler next to the MatX version. The total runtimes of the NumPy version, CuPy version, and MatX version are shown below:
While the code complexity and length are roughly the same, the MatX version shows a 2100x over the Numpy version, and over 4x faster than the CuPy version on the same GPU.
Key features include:
:zap: MatX is fast. By using existing, optimized libraries as a backend, and efficient kernel generation when needed, no hand-optimizations are necessary
:open_hands: MatX is easy to learn. Users familiar with high-level languages will pick up the syntax quickly
:bookmark_tabs: MatX easily integrates with existing libraries and code
:sparkler: Visualize data from the GPU right on a web browser
:arrow_up_down: IO capabilities for reading/writing files
MatX support is currently limited to Linux only due to the time to test Windows. If you'd like to voice your support for native Windows support using Visual Studio, please comment on the issue here: https://github.com/NVIDIA/MatX/issues/153.
Note: CUDA 12.0.0 through 12.2.0 have an issue that causes building MatX unit tests to show a compiler error or cause a segfault in the compiler. Please use CUDA 11.8 or CUDA 12.2.1+ with MatX.
MatX is using features in C++17 and the latest CUDA compilers and libraries. For this reason, when running with GPU support, CUDA 11.8 and g++9, nvc++ 24.5, or clang 17 or newer is required. You can download the CUDA Toolkit here.
MatX has been tested on and supports Pascal, Turing, Volta, Ampere, Ada, and Hopper GPU architectures. Jetson products are supported with Jetpack 5.0 or above.
The MatX build system when used with CMake will automatically fetch packages from the internet that are missing or out of date. If you are on a machine without internet access or want to manage the packages yourself, please follow the offline instructions and pay attention to the required versions of the dependencies.
Note for CPU/Host support: CPU/Host execution support is nearly on par with GPU support. Currently all elementwise operators, reductions, and FFT/BLAS/LAPACK transforms are supported. Most host functions with the exception of reductions support multithreading. If you find a bug in an operator on CPU, please report it in the issues above. More detail can be found here documentation.
MatX is a header-only library that does not require compiling for using in your applications. However, building unit tests, benchmarks,
or examples must be compiled. CPM is used as a package manager for CMake to download and configure any dependencies. If MatX is to
be used in an air-gapped environment, CPM can be configured to search locally for files.
Depending on what options are enabled, compiling could take very long without parallelism enabled. Using the -j
flag on make
is
suggested with the highest number your system will accommodate.
To build all components, issue the standard cmake build commands in a cloned repo:
mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DMATX_BUILD_TESTS=ON -DMATX_BUILD_BENCHMARKS=ON -DMATX_BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON -DMATX_BUILD_DOCS=OFF ..
make -j
By default CMake will target the GPU architecture(s) of the system you're compiling on. If you wish to target other architectures, pass the
CMAKE_CUDA_ARCHITECTURES
flag with a list of architectures to build for:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_CUDA_ARCHITECTURES="80;90"
By default nothing is compiled. If you wish to compile certain options, use the CMake flags below with ON or OFF values:
MATX_BUILD_TESTS
MATX_BUILD_BENCHMARKS
MATX_BUILD_EXAMPLES
MATX_BUILD_DOCS
For example, to enable unit test building:
mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DMATX_BUILD_TESTS=ON ..
make -j
MatX uses CMake as a first-class build generator, and therefore provides the proper config files to include into your own project. There are typically two ways to do this:
Adding the subdirectory is useful if you include the MatX source into the directory structure of your project. Using this method, you can simply add the MatX directory:
add_subdirectory(path/to/matx)
An example of using this method can be found in the examples/cmake_sample_project directory.
The other option is to install MatX and use the configuration file provided after building. This is typically done in a way similar to what is shown below:
cd /path/to/matx
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make && make install
If you have the correct permissions, the headers and cmake packages will be installed on your system in the expected paths for your operating
system. With the package installed you can use find_package
as follows:
find_package(matx CONFIG REQUIRED)
Once either of the two methods above are done, you can use the transitive target matx::matx
in your library inside of target_link_libraries
, e.g:
target_link_libraries(MyProject matx::matx)
MatX may add other optional targets in the future inside the matx:: namespace as well.
Documentation for MatX can be built locally as shown above with the DBUILD_DOCS=ON
cmake flag. Building documentation requires the following to be installed:
doxygen, breathe, sphinx, sphinx-rtd-theme, libjs-mathjax, texlive-font-utils, flex, bison
MatX uses semantic versioning and reserve the right to introduce breaking API changes on major releases.
MatX supports all types that use standard C++ operators for math (+, -, etc). Unit tests are run against all common types shown below.
int8_t
, uint8_t
, int16_t
, uint16_t
, int32_t
, uint32_t
, int64_t
, uint64_t
matxFp16
(fp16), matxBf16
(bfloat16), float
, double
matxfp16Complex
, matxBf16Complex
, cuda::std::complex<float>
, cuda::std::complex<double>
Since CUDA half precision types (__half
and __nv_bfloat16
) do not support all C++ operators on the host side, MatX provides the matxFp16
and
matxBf16
types for scalars, and matxFp16Complex
and matxBf16Complex
for complex types. These wrappers are needed so that tensor
views can be evaluated on both the host and device, regardless of CUDA or hardware support. When possible, the half types will use hardware-
accelerated intrinsics automatically. Existing code using __half
and __nv_bfloat16
may be converted to the matx
equivalent types directly
and leverage all operators.
MatX contains a suite of unit tests to test functionality of the primitive functions, plus end-to-end tests of example code. MatX uses pybind11 to generate some of the unit test inputs and outputs. This avoids the need to store large test vector files in git, and instead can be generated as-needed.
To run the unit tests, from the cmake build directory run:
test/matx_test
This will execute all unit tests defined. If you wish to execute a subset of tests, or run with different options, you may run test/matx_test directly with parameters defined by Google Test. To run matx_test directly, you must be inside the build/test directory for the correct paths to be set. For example, to run only tests with the name FFT:
cd build/test
./matx_test --gtest_filter="*FFT*"
We provide a variety of training materials and examples to quickly learn the MatX API.
v0.9.0:
v0.8.0:
v0.7.0:
polyval
, matvec
v0.6.0:
matmul(C, A, B, stream);
becomes (C = matmul(A,B)).run(stream);
. We have an open discussions board here. We encourage any questions about the library to be posted here for other users to learn from and read through.
We welcome and encourage the creation of issues against MatX. When creating a new issue, please use the following syntax in the title of your submission to help us prioritize responses and planned work.
[BUG]
to the beginning of the issue title, e.g. [BUG] MatX fails to build on P100 GPU
[DOC]
to the beginning of the issue title[FEA]
to the beginning of the issue title[QST]
to the beginning of the issue titleAs with all issues, please be as verbose as possible and, if relevant, include a test script that demonstrates the bug or expected behavior. It's also helpful if you provide environment details about your system (bare-metal, cloud GPU, etc).
Please review the CONTRIBUTING.md file for information on how to contribute code and issues to MatX. We require all pull requests to have a linear history and rebase to main before merge.